


Metamorphosis

by Lirillith



Category: Final Fantasy VI
Genre: Esper Terra, Family, Gen, Magic, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:53:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21949885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lirillith/pseuds/Lirillith
Summary: Terra transforms, in more ways than one.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 31
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Metamorphosis

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DreamsAtDusk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreamsAtDusk/gifts).



The fire is always inside her, sometimes just smoldering coals, sometimes crackling and dancing. When she needs it, it roars into inferno, spiraling around her hands and racing through air or over stone and earth to whatever it is that threatens her. 

Ever since she can remember, that's how it's been, but now in Mobliz she barely needs it at all. Sometimes she pushes some of it out of her, just a little nudge, to encourage a sluggish fire on a cold morning, but mostly, it stays inside. It doesn't leap up to singe the child who grabs her hand and pulls her along. It doesn't spread around her in the night to ignite the bedding and fill the cave with smoke. It stays banked.

For now.

She's never needed to keep it in before. She's never had reason to keep it in before; she's never gone weeks at a time without someone or something trying to kill her. 

At first she tries using it up, blasting fire at piles of rocks to scorch off the moss, or burning piles of broken boards and plaster. It feels good; it feels like emerging clean from a bath, or stretching. It feels right. But it doesn't feel safe enough, and one day a spark snags on dry brush, and the flames are high and strong and very wide by the time she finds a blanket they can spare to smother the fire.

No one actually catches her at it, but the next time they do laundry, Katarin pulls the scorched and sooty wool from the basin and stretches it out to look closer, and then asks Terra, "What happened?" without a moment's doubt or confusion. 

Somehow, the fact Katarin's also half-expecting her to explode makes it better, and Terra almost laughs as she explains. 

"I don't know anything about magic," Katarin says, "but that seems backwards."

"It does?"

"You don't learn to sew by throwing rocks."

Terra waits. There are so many things she doesn't understand — jokes and sayings and bits of songs and poems that people use all the time without thinking of them. Usually they explain to her, eventually, and after a moment of scrubbing the wet clothes, Katarin elaborates, "If you want to do something, you practice that thing, not something totally different. If you want to keep your magic in, you practice keeping it in, not letting it out."

"Oh," Terra says, but that's no help. The fire stays in, until it doesn't. What she wants is a lock for the door. 

She thinks of throwing rocks, and of Locke, throwing knives at a target. She tries, the next time they have a rubbish pile to obliterate, to arrange it into a target of her own, and directs the fire at the center of it.

This time, someone does see her, and Duane asks, "What was that about?"

Precision, she explains. Target practice. Control.

"I wonder," Duane says. "Can you do small things?"

After that, he keeps an eye out for exactly that, and brings his finds to her. Candles. Torches. An oil lamp with a broken chimney - she can practice lighting the wick, even if it's not safe around curious little kids who don't listen when told not to touch.

The first candle goes up in a spectacular fireball that gets her a surprise round of applause and a few whistles; several of the boys had been watching in secret, and Terra realizes that her secret is no longer any kind of secret at all. Because if a few of the children know, they all soon will. 

It doesn't seem to change them. They still grab her hands, drag her from game to game, shout for her and at her and at each other. They aren't worried that she'll explode, or melt, or burn their lives to ash. They don't fear her. 

If they ever do, she thinks, she'll leave. They have enough other things to fear, and she doesn't want to be one more.

She practices with the torches; they're big, and they're easy, but a few of them still become small bonfires before she gets the hang of it. They're easy to douse, too, shoved into a bucket of loose sand; they can use these later, and she doesn't want to waste more than she has to.

Next she turns to the candles. Wax, solid in her hands, feels as insubstantial as warm butter against her magic; she's pleased when she's able to only melt away half the wax and leave a lit wick burning above the mess, but it's still not enough, and they still have half a box left. So she keeps trying, until she's able to only light a wick, her flame as small and delicate as a match. 

Her ability to heal has never frightened anyone, and now that she's living with a dozen children running wild over the ruins of their home, it's more in demand than ever. She's always healing up scrapes and cuts and bumps and black eyes.

And then Duane comes rushing in, white as a sheet, with little Anna in his arms, screaming, and her leg bent at an angle it shouldn't be. There's blood, and a flash of bone. Katarin gasps, other children start to cry or scream — there'll be more nightmares tonight — and Terra just starts moving, calmly telling Duane to set Anna down and keep children cleared away, and bending over the injury to examine it. 

It would be easier if cleaned, but that would mean picking out the calmest person in the room to go find the cleanest cloth they have, and they have little enough as it is. What she needs is to set the bone. Too much blood could make the leg slippery, but Terra pulls off her shirt without a thought, using that to dry the blood, and calls to Duane to hold Anna's shoulders. 

He looks sick to his stomach, but he does as she asks, and Terra grimly does her part. Over Anna's screams of "Mama Mama Mama _stop it Mama_ ," she pulls, and guides, until the broken ends of the bone are together, and then she holds a leg that doesn't want to be the right shape anymore in place while she blasts magic into the right spot. 

She's never noticed before how _hot_ healing magic is, probably because she's never used so much outside of a battle.

"Ow ow ow ow," Anna whimpers, but she's not screaming anymore. Terra looks up at her tear-streaked face, and then at Duane's — he cried too — and then she looks around at the others. Three of the littlest ones are holding on to Katarin's skirts, sobbing. The very littlest, Claire, who's not even two yet, is in Katarin's arms, still crying and screaming and clinging to her neck. Terra catches a whiff of something, and wonders who threw up, and where. Everyone is staring at them. 

"Mama saved me," Anna says, but her voice is still hoarse from the screaming.

"I'm sorry it hurt," Terra says. "I did it as fast as I could."

The room is silent, except for Katarin shushing the little ones and the sound of sniffling. 

"It's better now," Anna says, her voice small and brave, and Terra's heart hurts a bit.

"Well," Duane says, after a moment that feels far too long. "Let's get to cleaning up." 

There are sniffles, and at least one child wiping a nose on a sleeve. They start to filter away. Katarin takes little Claire outside, one other child trailing behind her. And Terra stays kneeling with Anna, her hands and her undershirt smeared with blood, until Anna says, "Do you think I can stand up?"

"I think you can," Terra says, doubtfully. She's healed injuries worse than this, but only on adults, strong adults who were in the middle of fighting. Adrenaline carried them back into the battle and through the worst of the recovery. Anna is seven, and short for her age. She's still pale. But she wants to stand up, so Terra stands, and holds out one bloody hand to take Anna's small one. 

Terra hasn't transformed since the world ended. She hasn't touched a sword, though she's used a knife to clean fish and skin the animals they catch in Duane's traps, and a hunting bow to hunt larger game. And she hasn't been in any kind of fight. 

Then Phunbaba starts sniffing around the edges of town. At first he takes animals from the snares, and then he starts breaking into their storehouse. They keep losing things to him; a barrel of pickles, a bag of potatoes, and once, to everyone's dismay, an entire smoked ham. At first they just hid from him in the cave, but after the ham, they declare war. They bang on pots and pans with wooden spoons, from their hiding places, the dogs bark and snap, and Terra digs her sword out from under the bed and starts attacking him.

At first, he just runs away, but when he realizes they never chase, he starts calling their bluff. And that's where they are when Celes and Sabin walk out of the afterlife and back into Mobliz.

"You can't go," everyone tells her — Duane, in particular, but Katarin, and all the kids, too — and Terra herself tells her friends that she can't go. She can't even fight Phunbaba. 

She couldn't transform. She half-expected to, she was so angry at this green ogre stealing their food and scaring her children, but it never happened; even when the fire wreathed her arms and roared through the air, she never felt her shape changing or looked at her hands to see claws. She couldn't transform and she couldn't so much as singe his scaly hide, and even when he sent her flying and then picked her up by the hair to slam her head into the ground, she couldn't do more than scratch him with a blade.

What was happening to her? Why was she so weak? Had she turned off her magic, somehow, when she practiced controlling it? Had she used it all up? She's supposed to be half-Esper, but that half seems to be missing, now. 

Is she becoming too human, using her magic so little, living in relative peace? She keeps having all these feelings she doesn't understand. She feels her heart swell, sometimes, when she looks at the kids playing, or when one of them smiles or impulsively hugs her, or runs to her for comfort. Sometimes, when they're upset, or scared, when there are nightmares, it feels like her heart is hurting.

She doesn't find any answers, after Celes and Sabin leave. She goes down into the basement of one of the more solid houses, and tries to transform. She was always stronger that way; maybe, as an Esper, she can fight Phunbaba. But she can't change who she is. She can't make her hands back into claws when she's worked so hard to bank the fire and blunt the blade. 

And the fact that she can't is terrifying, now. The next time Phunbaba attacks, he claws one of the dogs across the nose. It's not serious — "I've seen worse from a cat," Katarin insists, that evening — but it scares Terra. What if he gets closer to one of the dogs, next time? What if he attacks the kids directly? 

Her fire hasn't lost its power, except when she's fighting Phunbaba; she blasts a pile of boards into charred splinters scattered halfway across the town, to Duane's great annoyance. A lot of things are annoying Duane, lately, firewood just one of many. And then Katarin comes down into the basement where Terra's trying to remember how being an Esper felt, and says, "I have something to tell you."

They spend a lot of time in that basement. They talk about the baby, and being scared, and about Duane, and about love. 

"I don't know what love is either," Katarin says. "Sometimes I look at Duane and I'm so annoyed I can't even see straight. And sometimes, I look at him and it's like my heart is too big for my chest."

 _Too big._ Terra thinks about that every day, after Katarin says it. She thinks about her father's memories, where she could see herself, as a baby, with a halo of curly green hair and a toothless smile, and she wonders what Duane and Katarin's baby will look like. She thinks of her father's memories of her mother, and her mother deciding to stay in the Esper world for her father. 

One day, she hears footsteps on the stairs, and she looks up to see Celes, again. "Katarin's going to have a baby," Terra says, right away, before Celes can even greet her. _You see, I need to stay. There are babies and laundry and there's bread to bake. I'm not meant for fighting anymore._

She's not meant for fighting, and Celes sees that, because when they hear the banging of pots and pans again, Celes says, "Stay here," and runs upstairs without Terra. 

But the kids are up there, and Phunbaba's up there, so Terra can't stay down here. She runs up, after, and she sees Phunbaba backhand Sabin into a wall, and sees Celes take a punch to the gut, and then she sees him spot Anna, where she's hiding behind a wall, not very well hidden at all. 

Terra runs at him, her hands empty, but fire rolling through her and circling around her and burning out of her throat as she screams like an eagle and flies right into his side, claws raking his green scales. She has claws, and fangs, and every time she hits him, he howls. His claws glance off her arm like she's made of steel, and she lashes fire across his back as he runs away from her. 

She stands, breathing hard; it feels _good,_ like when she used to blast apart the piles of rubble. And then she hears the voices. 

"Is it another monster?"

"Where did Mama go?"

"I'm scared..."

No. No. She can't change back now. She can't stay like this, when it scares them. Celes is trying to stand up, and Terra wants to go check on her and Sabin, heal them — and wasn't Cyan with them? Where did he go? — but the kids are all around, and they're scared, and Terra doesn't know what to do. 

Then she sees Anna. She's trembling, but she's coming closer, fists clenched, and Terra gets down on her knees so they're at eye level. Anna comes right up to her, and looks into her face, and she says, "Mama?" 

Terra can't speak. She nods. And that seems to be enough for everyone else, too, because the kids come pouring out of hiding. They surround her, and she's being hugged, and her heart feels far, far too big for her chest. 

Maybe she has become more human, but she's still as much Esper as ever before. She can be both. She doesn't have to choose between magic and love.


End file.
